Filming a wildlife programme with my sons

Wildlife cameraman Charlie Hamilton James wanted to teach his sons about the creatures who live on the river outside the family home. But getting the right shot takes a lot of patience and a high boredom threshold – could the boys wait it out?

Charlie Hamilton James

Fri 14 May 2010 19.30 EDT
First published on Fri 14 May 2010 19.30 EDT

Wildlife cameraman Charlie Hamilton James and his wife and fellow producer, Philippa Forrester, go for a walk on the river with their sons Fred, Gus and Arthur

Seeing a wild mother otter and her cub emerge from their den before setting off for a night's hunting is a sight few have ever witnessed. Otters are rare and extremely shy; filming them is difficult and requires patience and time, so why make things more difficult by dragging along a five-year-old boy?

Gus, my middle son and the five-year-old in question, had been hassling me for months to take him otter watching. I had been putting it off – it's hard enough filming otters on my own. I work as a wildlife cameraman and can sometimes spend weeks just getting a single shot. However, I was making a BBC television series, not just about the wildlife on the river outside our house, but about getting my sons out to watch it. Gus loves animals and had worked hard to persuade me to give the otter watching a second try. Our first attempts earlier in the year were unsuccessful – Gus didn't have the necessary patience and only managed nine minutes before he got bored and decided it was time to go home. I could have persisted, but it would have been pointless – as he once explained: "Dad, you must let me do it because if you don't, I will whinge, and I have a very powerful whinge!"

This time, however, I decided to do it differently. I rigged the entrance to the otters' holt with night-vision cameras and wired them all the way back to the car so that Gus and I could watch them in comfort, and from a necessary distance. When it was all set up and dusk began to fall, I went back to the house, wrapped Gus in his dressing gown and walked him up the road to where I had set up.

There was a lot of whispering when we arrived and I gave Gus his orders. One thing I've learned over several months of working with the boys is to empower them with a job – a sense of purpose seems to drag out their patience. "Gus, you sit in the front of the car and watch the monitors. You are chief otter spotter – if you see one tell me." Gus dutifully went to the front of the car and climbed in while I packed the last of the kit into the boot. "Dad, I see an otter," he said, as he settled into his seat. I ignored him. "Dad there's an otter." There couldn't possibly be an otter. It wasn't yet dark and Gus had only just parked his bum on the seat. "Dad, there's an otter."

I peered over the rear seats from the boot and saw the whiskered face of an otter on the monitor. I rushed to the front of the car and hit record. "Well done, Gus. Well done. You spotted it, well done."

"Sorry, Dad."

"You don't have to be sorry, Gus. You spotted the otter."

We sat whispering in the dark as we watched the otters on the monitor. It was a wonderful moment – the bringing together of all the elements we had worked so hard on – filming wildlife, getting the kids involved and discovering the secrets of the riverbank near our home. Most of the other sequences we had tried to shoot like this ended in chaos. We would sometimes get what we wanted but it would be a relentless battle with the boys' attention span. This moment with the otters was everything I could dream of and more. Until, of course, a minute or so into the encounter when Gus asked me if he could play a game on my phone.

I had been working closely with the kids on the project for several months by this point and was not surprised by the speed at which Gus's interest in the otters waned. All the boys love animals but the excitement of going out filming with dad at night is more seductive than actually seeing the animals. My job, despite its romantic appeal, is for the most part very boring. It involves hours and hours of sitting doing absolutely nothing – something kids are bad at. It is not even patience, as people always suggest to me; it is the management of boredom, hunger, cold and needing a wee – all things that kids are also very bad at. At the start of filming with them, I would lose my rag – I couldn't understand why they were unable to just do nothing. However, as time went on I began to find it more and more amusing. The boys had absolutely no interest in the fact that we were supposed to be filming sequences on certain subjects within a certain amount of time, and rather than fighting this and making them miserable, we just ended up going along with it, which was much more fun.

The strange way in which their brains are wired became a source of fascination, not just to me, but to the entire film crew. They had a completely different take on the world and a different set of values and interests in any subject or event. On one occasion I caught a baby mallard that had lost its mum. Gus came running out of the house to look at the fluffy duckling. I assumed he would want to coo over it but what he actually wanted to do was look at its bum. "Why?" I asked. "I just want to see what ducks' bums are like," he said.

On another occasion, I showed the boys the foot of a baby moorhen that had been eaten by an otter and then showed them some otter spraint (droppings), explaining that otters always spraint when they have finished eating. This, of course, was the most hilarious thing they had ever heard; Gus said it was like him eating cheese scones and then pooing on the sofa.

We started to learn to reframe a subject and make it interesting to the boys in order to hold their attention for a little longer. We also had to learn to live within their chaos and let them go with it rather than try to restrict them with our needs and constraints as parents and film-makers. The end result became less important; the whole operation became a learning process: learning about the kids, learning about the animals and learning about myself – whether we got the otter shot or not.

Having three boys with three years between each of them meant that we could do some things with all of them and some things with just one of them. Gus (five) was great for short periods of time. Arthur (two) was the same but didn't really have the grasp of what was going on in the same way as Gus did, and Fred (eight) was easier in the sense that with a bit of age comes a bit of patience. Fred, to his credit, managed nearly two hours of sitting doing absolutely nothing – the longest of all the boys. I had taken him to watch kingfishers. The chicks were just fledged, which meant that they hadn't seen humans before and had no fear. I wanted to ensure that Fred had a close encounter with one, so we found a good spot on the river and sat still on the bank. Eventually two young kingfishers turned up and sat right next to us, but by then Fred had had enough and was fidgeting. The birds flew off and Fred went into a sulk.

I can sit for weeks, bored out of my skull, doing nothing. I've done it all my life, I'm good at it and in the end I get the reward – the shot of the animal I'm filming. It's the only way to do my job and I expected the kids to be able to do the same, but they can't – the reward to them isn't tantalising enough. Watching the sequence of Fred and the kingfishers, I realise that I am a bit of a Victorian dad – I'm bossy and impatient. And I can see from the footage that the boys have actually been extremely patient, not just sitting and waiting, but with a dad far more obsessed with animals than they are. They have gone along with it, enjoyed it, humoured me and no doubt at times pretended to be interested when they probably weren't.

It's quite uncomfortable making a series about yourself and your family. You get to see yourself objectively, and the differences between you and your kids become a lot clearer. As a father it's hard not to want all the good things for your kids that you had when you were young, but my boys are not me. The question I now ask myself, after a year of trying to get my sons to sit quietly and do nothing is, why? Why would I want them to do nothing? They are far more interesting and exciting and entertaining just the way they are.

Halcyon River Diaries, BBC1 on 16 May at 6.10pm, in Scotland 4.45pm. There is a fully illustrated book to accompany the series, published by Preface, £20